Hey guys,
My journey began when I found my high school didn't offer computer science. I was thoroughly pissed, although I have since learned that the course hardly got through string manipulation. I took a course in web page design, where we learned how to use Microsoft FrontPage 2000. Yes, FrontPage, and the version from the year 2000. W00t. I can make a power-point like web page!
But I wanted to learn more. I didn't want to just hear, "This is how you make a text input box"; I wanted to hear, "This is how you make a text input box; and this is how you actually do something with the input." Seriously, would it be
that hard, Mr. Bronson, to show us how to email the input, if nothing else?
So through sites like
W3 Schools and
Tizag as well as mentors (a youth group leader, one of my friends, and DIC) I was able to pick up an understanding of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP. Things like XHTML interested me. But when I hit server side scripting, bam, I was hooked; and doomed to be a code monkey with a BCC (Blood Caffeine Content) well above the legal limit (I currently am wearing a "Google" baseball hat and a shirt that says "/(bb|[^b]{2})\").
Now that I have thoroughly bored you, I will now steal your minds, hearts, and souls to sell on the black market.
No. What I would really like to know is, how can I train to become a web engineer? Let's, for example, take a look at the requirements to work at a web hosting company. That's the sort of cool; backend manipulating stuff I'd like to eventually do. Still, I know very little about computers, how they work, etc. Where, and how, can I learn this sort of stuff?
- Perl I tried learning this once. The first pound sign hit me like a brick wall.
- Shell Scripting Don't you need some special software to work in the shell? What the hell does "usr" mean? User? Then why not say so?
- Command Line Is this like the command prompt? Linux doesn't have the Microsoft command prompt. Or at least.... I don't think so....
- TCP/IP Networking W3Schools has a tutorial in this, but it's 4 pages long. Something tells me after reading it; I won't know much about building and securing a network.
- Apache I know how to process .php files as .jpg files. That's it.
Any starting points would be great. Cool beginner tutorials? (That's something DIC should look into, beginners tutorials!) Books you found helpful? I can devote 1-2 hours daily to this, and I like the feeling of watching the sun rise after I've been up all night.
Regardless, I know you guys will be with me every step of the way.
Thanks a ton,
-Spear